For Sarah Jessica Parker, saying “yes” to wearing a string bikini may have played a part in her six appearances on the cover of Vogue. For Joseph Altuzarra, it all hinged on an e-mail sent late at night. For Garren, it was daring to suggest to the owner of the most stylish hair in the world that it might be time to change her look. For Isabella Rossellini, agreeing to do a favor for a friend launched a 20-year career. And for Vera Wang, it meant following up on a chance meeting at Yves Saint Laurent. But when they made it in Vogue, they knew they’d really made it. In honor of the magazine’s 120th anniversary (1892–2012), we asked some of our favorite designers, subjects, and contributors to share their stories.

SARAH JESSICA PARKERThe August 2011 issue marked her sixth appearance on the cover of the magazine, but back in 1994, well before Carrie Bradshaw ever set a Manolo-ed heel into the Vogue offices on Sex and the City,Sarah Jessica Parker was taking modeling tips from Linda Evangelista on the set of a Steven Meisel shoot. Here, the actress, who plays the editor of Vogue.com on Glee next month, tells the story behind her first major appearance in our pages.

When I was growing up, the only magazine we had in the house was The New Yorker, but when I moved to New York, pretty early on, I’d go to the newsstand and buy Vogue with my own money, a tiny disposable income from acting, and that was a big part of my independence. Fashion was something I wanted to explore for myself. In those days it was all about inspiration, it was all about aspiration. You’d look at the magazine and you’d put together this wish list of things that might never exist, and then you’d go out and do your best at Alice Underground.

The first major time I was ever in Vogue was in 1994, when I was filming Miami Rhapsody. I had just one page, but it was part of what was for me an enormously meaningful fashion story. It was called “The White Album” [April 1994], on the color white, and it was with Grace Coddington, and Steven Meisel was photographing and Garren was doing the hair; it was a perfect portrait of a very specific time. I posed in a white bikini, which I would never, ever have worn in a million years. Nobody in the world could have convinced me to wear it except for Grace. The shoot was during a snowstorm, and there were no cabs, but I was living on Tenth Street, and so I walked to Broadway and Lafayette, where they were already shooting Linda Evangelista. I was terrified, but Grace had a small rack of choices ready for me, including these two very tiny pieces of fabric. And I thought, I can summon enormous courage and reject the bikini and perhaps end my relationship with Vogue forever, or I can summon a different kind of courage, the kind where you agree to do whatever is asked of you, and that is what I did.

Linda stood off to the side and gave me notes—stand like this; stand like that. And I think I got a Polaroid afterward, which I immediately hid in a drawer, and later I met my publicist at the time and wrote thank-you notes to all of them: Garren, Grace, Steven, Linda, and everyone else. Though I’m not really keen on pictures of myself, when the issue came in the mail, I looked at the story, and I thought, Oh, well, that’s that, and I figured that would be the end of my association with Vogue. Of course it was only the beginning.

I feel very connected to the story the magazine tells. There’s a part of me that really appreciates it because I’ve had opportunities to work there in the past years, to understand the way it works internally. There’s also a part of me that simply holds Vogue in high regard, that thinks of it as separate from me, as if I had never walked into the Condé Nast building in my life.

When we were doing the Vogue wedding dress shoot in the first Sex and the City movie, having Vogue actually call in the dresses [for the scene] was incredible. Without Vogue we couldn’t have made it as decadent, as luxurious, as big as we wanted it to be. There were too many dresses, and not enough time! But I said to Michael [director Michael Patrick King], “This is an experience, this is a dream; we have to make it enormous and indulgent and let the audience into what they think the experience is.” So we were true to that: We made a Vogue heaven on earth.

I learned from the early days that nothing about a fashion shoot is set in stone. You have to show up with lots of tricks and ammunition, you never know what can happen. When I had my salon in Niagara Falls, before I moved to New York and started working for Vogue, I had given so many Farrah Fawcett cuts, I thought, If one more woman walks in the door wanting the Farrah Fawcett! Back then, celebrities weren’t on the cover of Vogue the way they are now; it was a rare thing. I remember it was 1978, and Polly Allen Mellen,Patrick [Demarchelier],and myself were booked for a shoot, and Polly said, “We can’t tell you who it is beforehand, it’s a secret.” So I thought, Who could this be? And in the door walks Farrah Fawcett.

It was a two-day shoot: The first two pictures, we did the Farrah Fawcett hair, and then that night I said to Polly, “What if we do her hair straight, with a side bang, sleek and tight to her head?” And Polly thought about it, and she said, “You know, I brought these men’s suits from Calvin and Ralph. Tomorrow, after Farrah looks at all the clothes, why don’t you say what you want to do, and I’ll sell it to her.” So Farrah picked out the clothes she loved and thought she looked great in, and then she tried on a tux, and said, “Oh, I don’t know if it’s me.”

“But what if your hair was really sleek,” I suggested, and sort of showed her in the mirror. And she looked at me and then she looked at Polly and said, “OK, let’s try it.” She had just done her first big movie, and was starting to break away from Charlie’s Angels, and she was ready to do something different. So I did most of her hair straight and pulled back, and she looked amazing. After the shoot that night, she was going to a party at Studio 54. She went out with her hair sleek, as I’d done it. The next morning there was a snowstorm, the blizzard of all blizzards. I remember walking through the snow to the bodega and looking at the New York Post, and the headline was something like Familiar Face? Different Style: Guess Who This Is, and there was her picture, right on the cover. And I looked over at another paper, and there she was again. They had clicked her—and there it was on the front pages; it had gone viral, in the way things did before the Internet, and it was so great, and it was all about Vogue.

ISABELLA ROSSELLINISince 1980, she’s been photographed for Vogue by the very best, everyone from Bill King to Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton to Herb Ritts; even Irving Penn has shot her portrait. Before she became a well-known actress and model, she happened, almost by accident, upon her very first shoot for the magazine.

I was 28 when I first modeled for Vogue. Nowadays if you are a celebrity, you are allowed to be a little older, but I was just beginning my career and nobody asked my age—and I didn’t know about this “problem.” It all came about because my friend Frances Grill, who later founded Click Models, was starting her agency, but she didn’t have many strong women then, only men, and she needed someone for a go-see at Vogue. So I said, sure, I’ll go, just as a favor to Frances. I didn’t really think anything of it. But to my surprise I got picked by Bill King for a beauty story called “Beauty U.S.A.” about the four seasons—I had makeup for spring, summer, fall, winter—and when [Condé Nast Editorial Director] Alex Liberman saw it, he liked it and had me do a cover try that was sent to Richard Avedon.And that was it . . . I hit it very big right away! Avedon asked me to do a cover, and immediately I had three covers for Vogue. I didn’t plan to be a model. It really just happened.

It opens many doors if you are in Vogue; it’s like the Queen approves: It acknowledges that, whether you are in the social pages or on the cover, you have arrived. After those first covers, my life suddenly, completely changed: I was contacted by Lancôme, given a contract, and this made me totally financially independent. It put me on a level where I never expected to be.

When I was married to Martin Scorsese, it was very frustrating to go to dinner because people would ask what I did, and I’d have to say, oh, well, I do these short films for Italian television that you’ve never seen. But becoming a model integrated me in America, and I enjoyed it immensely, working with everyone: the photographers, the stylists, the makeup artists, the hairstylists. At Vogue, we were creating fantasy; we were creating magic. It was never exactly what clothes to buy, but a suggestion, an imaginative point of view. You could become inspired by those pictures, go out, and invent your own look.

When I first started out, it was September 2008, right before New York Fashion Week. I was living in an apartment with my cousin Lily [Kwong], a fourth-floor walk-up on West Twenty-ninth Street and Ninth Avenue. I had done a collection for spring/summer 2009—it was very small, just fifteen looks, all hanging in my living room. I wrote out all the invitations by hand for people to come and see the clothes, and I also sent out e-mails to various editors. The only e-mail address I had at Vogue was [Fashion News Director] Mark Holgate’s; a PR assistant at an agency had given it to me. I sent out all the e-mails at around 1:00 a.m. Twenty minutes later, I got my first response, and it was from Mark, who had just had to cancel his travel plans because of work.

A couple of days later, he came up those four flights to see the clothes. I don’t think I slept the night before. At that point, no one else had seen them—only my mother and Lily. But Mark and I talked about the collection for a long time, and he asked me pretty much then and there if Vogue could photograph my designs. Having him be the first person to see and respond to my clothes was such a huge, huge deal; I had never expected Vogue to reply at all because I was such small potatoes. But Mark suggested I come by and see Anna Wintour,and we set the appointment for the Tuesday after Paris Fashion Week.

I was on a Monday night flight back from Paris, and when I landed I found out Air France had lost all the clothes, which meant I had nothing to show Anna the next morning and had to cancel. It was devastating! The collection had been a year’s work in the making. Finally, after a week, the airline found the clothes, and when at last I met with Anna, she was so gracious and so encouraging. I still get butterflies when she comes to preview the collection, but the thing she told me then and still tells me now is that I should always let my creativity carry me. I should never be too worried about commercial success, that all of that will follow.

My Vogue story is a little bit of a Lana Turner story—not that I’m blonde and buxom, but you get the idea. I really lost my way when my figure-skating career ended. I was nineteen, and I was in a panic because nothing had played out the way I’d hoped, after years of hard work. I ended up living in Paris for a while, which was truly the center of fashion then. The French women were so elegant and so chic; they had defined how to knot a scarf. This was the era of the Hermès bag—the Kelly—and everyone was wearing wonderful colors of nail polish, which was suddenly a very big deal at that time.

Back in New York, I tried to carry a little of Paris with me. I was working as a salesgirl and doing windows at Yves Saint Laurent on Madison Avenue, and one day [Fashion Director] Frances Patiky Stein came into the store, spotted me, and told me to look her up when I was out of college. I felt like I was at that famous pharmacy in Hollywood where all the stars got discovered. There I was in my YSL, my Le Vernis nail polish, in the heyday of Saint Laurent. And this was Vogue! Growing up I’d been a total hound for Vogue, just like my mother. But when I went home and told her the news, she was so sarcastic; she said, “She’s never going to hire you, don’t be ridiculous. You’re a college girl on a summer job.”

When I graduated, two years later, I called Frances up, and it was as if I had fairy dust sprinkled over me. She actually remembered me, and she wanted to hire me! She sent me to Mary Campbell, who was a legend in Condé Nast personnel, and Mary looked at me and said, “Can you type? Ninety words a minute?” I could hunt and peck, but that wasn’t good enough. So I went to Betty Owen Secretarial School, and I sat in that school with my red nails, learning to type, and eventually Vogue took me on as a rover, assisting the fashion editors on shoots.

On my first day, I showed up wearing a shirtwaist, platforms, and of course those red nails, and [Fashion Editor] Polly Allen Mellen took one look at me and said, “Go home and change. When you come in here, you’re going to work.” So I came back in jeans.

Over time, I became paramilitary; I’d wear a jacket with 30 pockets to hold all the things I needed on shoots—all those pins, and that eternal pincushion. These were the last days of Vogue as a twice-monthly magazine, and our office was on Madison Avenue back then. But it was also a hallowed time; it was the beginning of my life—and it has influenced everything I’ve done since.